Next time you play a game, any game, consider how many ideas in it appeared in other games. For the record, Star Control: Origins is not a clone of Star Control II. For obviously reasons, it's a 25 year old game and as we have stated countless times, it wasn't commercially viable to continue that story. We were interested in licensing the ships from Star Control II to include in Fleet Battles but they declined to so we didn't include them. But even if it were a "Clone" of the gameplay of Star Control II, that doesn't fall under copyright protection. See here for more information on that.

So at long last, the meat of their complaint. They think they own the ideas listed.

UPDATE: No, we did not make up this chart. You can find their chart here. These are their claims and words. We have not edited their claims.

As a reminder, this table was made by Reiche and Ford. Not us. We aren't putting words in their mouths here. This is what they actually believe. This is their justification for filing a DMCA to take down a shipping game.

As for their argument that game ideas count as expressions and can be copyrighted, the copyright office already admonished them for this erroneous misinterpretation.

Either way, I'm not going to play 'internet lawyer' I'm just fascinated by how legal precedents work and I'm interested to see what comes of this.

There is no legal precedent here.

Anyone suggesting that Star Control: Origins, a 2018 era game is somehow a "rip off" of a 1992 DOS game needs to rethink their life choices. By that argument, every first person shooter is a rip off of Wolf3D.